In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the importance of moving people to jealousy in order to fulfill the ultimate requirement set by God. He highlights the need for a specific kind of song service that will not only impact Jews but also transform communities and the world. The speaker shares his personal experience of a three-year period of death and isolation, during which he had a profound revelation about the significance of the church's relationship with Israel. He references the story of Ezekiel 37, the Valley of Dry Bones, as a powerful example of the restoration and revival that can come through the church's obedience to God's calling.

Precious God, man of sorrows, Lord be the Lord of my mood as well as my speaking. And bring forth, Lord, something precious, something abiding, something foundational for these whom you've gathered before yourself tonight, Lord. Make this a once and for all occasion. Make it compact. Make it full. Let it touch, Lord, all of the categories of our faith. May we be willing to submit to reconsideration things that we've held, my God, unwisely or not well or romantically or sentimentally that needs to be adjusted, Lord, to things as you see them. But take possession, Lord, of this vessel. Let me not err against you. And bless this people tonight in a signal way, an appointed way, my God. We thank and give you praise. In Jesus name, amen. Well, I'm covering myself right from the beginning because I am in a strange mood. I trust it's the Lord. I had to ask my personal physician who gave me antibiotics today for a bunged up foot, whether that had affected my mood or robbed me of some rest I wanted to have before coming. But he says no. So it's either the enemy or I do have a very sober subject. It's Israel's imminent catastrophe, the apocalyptic end of the present state of Israel. How would you speak that? How would you speak it to people who have a sympathetic disposition and want by every means to see present Israel success succeed? And along comes a Jewish speaker and says, no, you're barking up the wrong tree. This nation is not scheduled to succeed, but to die. So I don't know how to speak these things. It's not that I've not spoken them before and even written of them, but it's not a pleasant subject, but it ends in glory. So I must feel like praying and Lord guide me directly. You know, I looked over some of the ponderous scriptures that seem to clearly testify that I'm not walking out on some limb and need to scratch for a scripture or two to support an unusual thesis. The remarkable thing is that there's a surfeit. There's an overwhelming abundance of scripture that speak of this cataclysmic and imminent disaster. And the remarkable thing is that nobody seems to have seen it. Even the believers living in Israel seem not to have seen it, or they have prematurely taken scriptures that speak of the millennial blessedness and invoke them prematurely. Either way, either I'm strangely out of it and have missed it and deserve to be put on the shelf or worse, or I'm a lone voice speaking a necessary word to save even God's people from outside of Israel, from a fatal, perhaps fatal disillusionment and even a forfeiture of faith. If the hope for expectancy does not materialize and it would seem as if every expectation has been contradicted and God is not the God we thought and his word is not reliable. Do you know what I mean? Paul speaks of a great falling away in the last days, and I'm already assured that not the least reason for it will be a naive and mistaken expectation of Israel's immediate future. Because if I have a proper understanding of what is the immediate future of Israel, there will be another such catastrophe, another Holocaust. It will not be confined to Europe. It will be global. You'll not be exempt. The consequences will resonate through every nation, including South Africa. After all, you have 80,000 Jews here. And God says, it's the time of Jacob's trouble. Jesus said, unless that time were cut short, no flesh would survive. But for the elect's sake, that small surviving remnant, that time will be cut short. And I believe that he's speaking about an event that is yet future. Part of my controversy with other men of a prophetic kind who totally disagree with me say that the time of Jacob's trouble is past. It was the Nazi Holocaust. Oh, is that right? Well, how then does it have its inception in Jerusalem? How then does Jesus warn that they should, that those that are there should flee to the mountains of Judea and pray that it not come on the Sabbath. All of these admonitions only make sense in the context of a people upon whom a fury of devastation falls within the land and not in Germany, not in Europe. I mean, it's so elementary. How is it that these, these men could miss a logic of that kind? But you know what I'm sensing? Leadership, maybe especially messianic. Well, let me put it in another way. If you have an agenda, you have a view that is dear to you and you want by all means to see fulfilled and succeed. Like for example, the establishment of the present state, you will read scripture in such a way as to strengthen, fortify, validate that view. But you know that such a practice is ipso facto non-prophetic. It flies in the face of what is prophetic for prophetic. If it means anything is allowing the scriptures to speak to us. We don't come with an agenda. We don't come with an already determined perspective. We simply come, we submit, we bow before the word of God and we don't impose our will or intention upon it. So I'm learning some remarkable things just being at the center of a bit of controversy that was especially raised by the conference we conducted in Israel. I was saved in Jerusalem 35 years ago and we had been going back virtually every year to minister to the body of Christ. They used to say that when art comes, the word of the Lord comes with them. They don't say it anymore because this word that I now bring is frightening, apocalyptic, full of impending terror, judgment, devastation, ruin, desolation. And of course, if you're living in the land, that's the last thing you want to hear. And as so many of my brothers said, but art, how can it be true? What about our ministries? It's not so much that the land is going to be devastated, but then how can our ministries continue? Can you understand why men like me border on insanity? And so we had to conduct the conference in our own hotel. And the title of the conference was the coming calamity of Israel. Not one single soul came whom I had known over the past quarter of a century, but one woman who came to heckle, what do you call it? Interfere, to sound off and mock me and so on. And then when we got home, there was a letter waiting for us signed by 13 of the most eminent leaders in the body of Christ in Jerusalem or Israel. Many messianic ministries, men whom I've known for years, condemning me as a false prophet and harassing the church and giving aid to the enemy. And so we took exceeding great pain to answer them in a sound exegetical way, which is not my prophetic suit. The prophetic proclamation is a gush, but what these men needed was a reason answer to their judgment. And we took four to six weeks to draft it. And if you're on internet, you can read it. It's on our website and our websites. The address is printed on our newsletter. Our newsletter is on the table. If, if we run out, it's www.benisrael.org organization and up will come the burning bush. Why the burning bush? It's for as many as we'll turn aside to see. Isn't that remarkable that the critical issue of God's employment of Moses as the deliverer of Israel was waiting to see if he would turn aside to see this strange site of a bush that burned, but was not consumed fire. Fire is always the emblem and the symbol of judgment. And there are not many who want to look into it. We would rather circumvent it and pass it by. It's not pleasant. It jostles us. It affects our categories, but Moses not only turned to see, but to understand why that's apostolic, that's pleasing in God's sight. And with the God that we had a church that would turn aside to see the Lord, uh, quicken those verses for me. Some years ago, I was on a plane. I'm always on planes and sure enough, I'm always sitting next to a Jewish passenger. And sure enough, they don't have to wear a Star of David for me to know that all my vibes go loose and the plane was crowded. And, uh, I turned to this precious young lady in the middle, in the three seats. So I was on the aisle seat. I had my Bible on my lap. I was reading Exodus chapter three, Moses in the burning bush. Usually I read sport illustrated or other magazines that I'm too stingy to buy. And the plane, the plane is not a place for serious Bible reading. But there at that time, I was reading that text. And this woman, of course, was looking at me. Here's a modern man with a Bible on his lap. And I turned to her and I said, when do you think you'll see again, another Jew on a plane reading his Bible instead of saying, Oh, she turned the other way. And so I didn't say anything. And we were coming in for landing. I said one more time, when do you think, again, you'll have another occasion to meet a Jewish man who has met God and has been transformed by him in the name and the discovery of the Messiah, the Holy one of Israel, something like that. She turned the other way and the plane landed. We plotted never to see each other again. She missed a once in for all occasion. If she had, but ask one question, what you believe in that insane, grayish Gentile Greek myth or any way that she would have in any way turned to inquire, to ask, it would have been setting in motion, the kinds of things that would have devastated every security, every expectation for the future. And she knew it. She had a nice, sound Jewish instinct not to expose herself by turning because as the rabbis say in one of the rare commentaries that I so appreciate the reason that God said, called Moses twice when he saw him turn and to look was that anyone who turns aside to see need not have any assurance. He can never turn back. Once you turn aside, you're putting in jeopardy, all that you understand, all that constitutes the security of your religious and spiritual life, all of your neat categories that you've taken so long to frame. Once you turn to look at a strange apparition, fire judgment, there's no assurance you'll ever come back to where you were before. And in fact, it's my hope that that will be true for you tonight. Not that where you are is in any way to be what's the word, uh, unappreciated, but there's a deeper apprehension of truth and reality that waits for the knowledge of God that is given exclusively in judgment. You know what I've noticed in 35 years as a believer, that there's a strange aversion on the part of God's people to consider God as judge. There's something about judgment that somehow does not appeal to us because after all, how do you reconcile a God who judges a God of wrath? Wasn't that the old Testament God? Praise God that he's retired. And the new Testament God who has replaced him is full of mercy and love. And I am, I am the Lord. I change not. And we say the same yesterday, today, and forever. The God of wrath is the God of mercy. Wrath is his mercy. If you could, but understand and to shun his, his wrath is to shun God, to, to read out any attribute of God, which is indivisible. You can't separate his attributes is to lose God. And judgment is at the heart of God. When, when the world will, when, when God will bring judgments in the earth, the world will learn righteousness. What's the scripture that gave you today in chapter nine of the book of Psalms, something on judgment, major on judgment saints. It will not be depressing. Psalm nine, verse 16. The Lord is known by the judgment, which he executed. Did you hear that? The Lord is known by the judgments, which he executes. So the Nazi Holocaust, what was it? A peculiarity of history, a little aberration, a, an unfortunate dint of circumstance because of the madman called Hitler. Or is God sovereign? And if that was his judgment, is it to be known by it in a way that he would not otherwise be known and known in full. God has appointed Israel to be a witness to the nations. And it's remarkable and ironic that Israel succeeds more profoundly in being that witness in her apostasy and in her failure and in her separation from God than ever in her success. But she's a witness still. That's why Paul says in Romans 11, behold the severity and goodness of God. When have you beheld it less? Come on, get honest. We don't want to behold the severity of God. We have a natural propensity to behold his goodness. But I'll tell you, dear Saints, if you take the one at the expense of the other, you have an inadequate God. I don't care that you put the label on and call him Jesus. We do not know him as we ought. If we are in flight from his judgment and from his wrath, which is the heart of his righteousness. And in fact, the one Holocaust that revealed God as no other that preceded the Nazi Holocaust was the one that came upon Jesus himself. The crucifixion of Jesus was a Holocaust. It was a devastation. He was marred more than any man. He had no beauty that we should desire him. He was a wreck. All the powers of hell, the fury of everything inimical opposed to God came upon him in such severity that left him a shambles. Have you ever seen that Holy Ghost masterpiece, the crucified Christ that hangs in Colmar, France? Somebody help me. Who's the artist? The Sisters of Mary celebrate that painting. Who's the Sisters of Mary? That's Aaliyah Schlenk. Anybody? Does that ring a bell anywhere? That movement in Darmstadt, Germany celebrates that painting. I went out of my way as an atheist 36 years ago, hitchhiking through Europe, looking for philosophical answers to a distraught ex-Marxist left-wing radical life to see that painting because someone had picked me up off the side of the road who was an art teacher and said, Art, you mustn't miss seeing this one painting. Oh, I'd seen, I was in the Prado. Is that the museum in Madrid? One of the great art museums of the world. And I couldn't get over it. Every floor was loaded with paintings on Jesus, whether the Lord was just conditioning my Jewish atheistic heart to see that this was the preeminent theme of past times up until modernity. And then we got sloppy. Then men flung paint at canvas and every kind of abstract nonsense. But in those previous generations, when art was a significant activity, Jesus was a preeminent theme. Crucified on the cross, being taken down into one form or another. Jesus with his disciples. I was just overwhelmed, but I'd seen too many depictions of Jesus as a Jew on velvet with sequins and pillows or Jesus on a cross looking more like a ballet dancer than a suffering servant. I had to stand before this painting at Coma and I was transfixed. I was stupefied. I gasped. It is a holy ghost masterpiece of a man who's a piece of wreckage, so devastated that you wonder if you're looking at a man or some kind of gnarled animal whose jaw is a gape in death and the lips are white and the flesh has pieces of wood and other kinds of things that were imparted with the flagellation gangrenous, the color of the skin and hung over in total death and devastation and defeat. It's a, it's a hypnotizing picture. You can't stand before them and not come undone. And he was an atheist looking at this. That was a holocaust. But when you walk around the back of the same painting is the resurrection side. And every place where the first side showed the perforations and the wounds, the resurrection side shows the beams of glory coming through the same perforations and wounds. I commend it to you. Make a trip to Coma, France. And if not inquire where you can get copies of that print and hang it in a conspicuous place, it will temper your whole Christian life. Because think of this saints, what would happen? What would be the character of our faith? What would be our witness in a troubled world and in a crisis ridden South Africa? If the crucifixion of Jesus becomes shabby, sentimentalized, glossed over, familiar, what if it loses its sharp edge and it's breaking in? What if it doesn't stupefy us in the way that it ought to confront us? What does this mean? I want to tell you what it means or enough to tease you to look, to seek out what it means. It means the most profound statement of God ever presented to men in point of time. The crucified Christ is the statement of God in judgment. Jesus suffered the sin of mankind. He was judged. He bore that judgment in all of its terrible cruelty and devastation. So it was a statement of God's righteousness that God alone can pay. But it was a statement of God's mercy. It was a statement of God's trinitarian composite Godhead, because the son who is bearing this cries out by the spirit and yields up his spirit to the father, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? In one historic moment is the most profound statement of God as God, as has ever been put before men. Have you taken the content out of that? Have you sucked the marrow out of that bone? I would say probably the single reason for the prevalent shallowness of God's people, particularly in the charismatic realm is the absence of this consideration. We don't want to look into that burning bush. And the Holocaust of the Jew is related to the Holocaust of Jesus. I can almost say, in fact, my book does say that the lack of the consideration of the first by my people made their own crucifixion ultimate and unavoidable because we pride ourselves in our monotheistic view of God. And we think we're doing God's service by defending monotheism and that the Christians somehow have three gods. Well, the monotheistic view of God is not God. It's a construct of a humankind that has all kinds of implications. There are reasons why men prefer this kind of simplification of God, but God in his triunity, God in his fullness has other implications for our own present walk and relationship. So our theology and our doctrine is altogether related to our comfort zone. And that's more than I can say tonight, but so we Jews have paid for a, what do they call the, the dismissal of the Holocaust? Because this is now a Jewish complaint in the world. There's a word for that where people deny that the Holocaust ever took place, or they say that was greatly exaggerated or that revisionism. Oh, praise the Lord. Doug, that God sent you. Here's a brother joining us on the trip home. I had never seen till we met at the airport. First time I've ever done that. Revisionism is the dismissal of the Holocaust in its historicity and Jews, the Jewish community and its agencies just foam at the mouth in anger at the dismissal of one of the most brute facts of modern times and rightly so. But to what degree are we reaping what we have sown? We have been revisionistic in dismissing the crucifixion of Jesus as the mere unhappy and melancholy end of a political misfit who got the authorities all riled up because people might have followed him as King. That's all that it means. It means much more. It means ultimately more. And Jesus wept because he knew that there would be a tragic consequence for people that dismissed the most profound revelation of God as God that has got to have consequence in time and it has and it will yet again. I'll praise the Lord for a comprehending brother. If I had time and the Lord so led and you had the interest and I just commend this to you because I don't think I'm going to take that time. Try reading Isaiah 53, not only as the suffering of Jesus, but the suffering of a nation that is yet to follow him in a road to Calvary. Because I believe and we are preparing practically for a mass movement of Jews throughout the world being uprooted in every country and forced march in flight from persecution to all nations. That sifting is yet future. And I would say the majority of Jews alive in the world today will not survive it. In fact, it says in that same text, those that transgress the rebels that transgress against me, I will bring them out of the nations where in they have sojourned, but I will not bring them into the land. The same thing is repeated in Ezekiel 20, that this final uprooting in time of Jacob's trouble in the sifting of Jews through the nations and nations where they are not necessarily presently resident, but are brought by the providence of God in remote wilderness places is the last opportunity to, to bring through ultimate trial a people for his name. You know, the chorus that we sing, and so the redeemed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads. They shall, they shall obtain gladness and joy and mourning and sighing shall flee away. You want to know how pathetic is the condition of the church, how usurping we are in our mindlessness and taking to ourselves that which does not belong to us, but is descriptive and intended for Israel is the way that we sing that chorus, thinking that we're singing about ourselves. When have we had mourning and sighing and when shall we have what they will have? What will it mean for the Jewish people to see their present state extinguished and their hope of a national homeland? You know, even if we American Jews don't have a disposition to go there and it's not a place that I would want to live, having lived there and having been kicked out of there as a believer, it's a tough place and it's going to become horrendous in the violence that will issue there. And I'm of course at odds with those who want to send Jews to Israel. I said, well, go ahead, but you're sending them from the frying pan to the fire. Israel will be the vortex of unbelievable violence. They are safer in the nations than they will be in the land. But whether we go to Israel or not, there's a certain sense of security that Jews would have anywhere in the world, that there is a place that they could have gone should they desire to be safe within a Jewish nation. And if that nation is removed, it will bring a sorrowing and a sighing that cannot be explained by any other event. So I have to groan and gasp my way through a subject like this. There are so many scriptures. I was looking today at Ezekiel 36. Make a note of these references that upon their return, when I will return them to the places where they have been scattered, which is not a statement of present Israel's constituency today. They will rebuild the cities that have been laid waste and made desolate and left in ruins. That's not a reference to the cities of antiquity. That's a reference to present day Haifa, Jerusalem, Tiberias, and all of the other cities of Israel. There'll be a, there's a cry in Isaiah. The land has become our destruction. That's future. But imminent. And so we can see all of the forces that are at play, bringing this fulfillment in Israel's untenable condition, both with ringed about by nations intent upon her destruction. And now within her own borders, a Palestinian presence on to the teeth with the very same intention. And no amount of negotiation will save her. The very negotiation shows a mentality that is so human, so rationalistic that assumes that if you present to your enemies a scheme by which they will share in the prosperity that will come to the region, if they will lay down their and their desire for vengeance and their arms, that they will subscribe to that. And if you meet them and accommodate them, then we'll all share in the prosperity of the Middle East and luxuriate in the Israel that becomes the Hong Kong of the Middle East. And that man's self-interest that he will enjoy a prosperity and abetment will, will be the factor that even takes recalcitrant Arabs. And those of that Islamic demoniacal hatred, and then allow them to be pacified and to accommodate and make peace with Israel. That's what I'm saying. It's based on a premise that man will act in his own best interest. That's a piece of humanistic presumption that is going to come apart in the face of Israel because their enemies are not concerned with self-interest. They're concerned with vengeance and devastation and retribution. So Israel is going to suffer for faulty premises because they have an incorrect view of man predicated on their own assumptions about themselves because we Jews act in self-interest. So surely all enlightened men must, had they not been, what's the word about putting away the Holocaust? Had they not been revisionist and looked at the crucifixion of Jesus, they would have had a statement about man's nature and condition that would have saved them from this presumption now that will mean their death. Am I getting too complicated? Can you follow some of the things that I'm trying to suggest? You know, what's wrong with us among other things and why it is we have shallow, saccharine, sentimental expectations that are not biblically grounded? It's because we want a happy ending. We want to see that work out nicely. And don't they deserve it after all, having been knocked about and suffered through the ages. Don't you think that even though they're having present problems, that they can work it out? Can't they progressively come to a place of improvement and finally be a blessing to all the families of the earth? This is a deep theological question, whether there is such a thing as progressive improvement, that a nation can be ameliorated and improved and come to that condition that will fulfill God's statement about Abraham and his descendants to bless all the families of the earth. The reason that we have erred in a shallow expectation for present Israel is that we have had no understanding of Israel's ultimate destiny and glory and calling. It's because Israel has the call to bless all the families of the earth. It's because God has chosen her as the locus of his theocratic rule over all nations. It's because Jerusalem is God's intention for his sanctuary and dwelling. It's because the holy hill of Zion will be the seat of his divine government, that the law shall go forth out of Zion and the word of God out of Jerusalem, that Israel must be so dealt with. And we have erred in hopeful expectation because we project upon that nation something of the same kind of shallow considerations we have for ourselves. We have not understood the issue of God's glory as being greater than the issue of mere national survival or success. The fact that we have a success mentality rather than a glory mentality is enough to assure that we're going to miss the significance of Israel in the last days. And if we miss it and we're not psychologically, spiritually and practically prepared for the uprooting of this people and the tremendous sifting of this time of Jacob's trouble, there'll not be any survivors at all. The church has the mandate to extend mercy that they may obtain mercy. And if we don't anticipate that their devastation and be prepared for it realistically there's not a soul in the world that will extend themselves to take them in in the time of their final devastation. The first judgment of Jesus as King after the smoke clears from these final apocalyptic events and the remnant of Israel is restored is a judgment on the Gentiles in the world over one question, what did you do with the least of these my brethren? And those who say, Lord, Lord, when did we see you hungry, thirsty, naked and in prison? His answer is, as you did not see them and do for them as you did not do it for me. And your failure to be to them what you ought brings a judgment of a radical ultimate kind that those who did not extend themselves are cast into the lake of fire reserved for the devil and for his angels though they said, Lord, Lord, it may well be that the issue of the Jew and Israel in the last days is the very sifting that will not only sift Israel, but will sift the nations will sift the churches and identify who in fact God's people really are. God's people who have his heart and his identification for that people, even in their apostasy, even in their sin, even in their judgment will be revealed by their ability to extend mercy, that they might obtain mercy at a time when extending it will be like the world war two time for Corrie ten Boom and other of the Dutch people who risked their lives to extend help to the Jews in their midst. That was a dress rehearsal. That was a minuscule faint intimation of the magnitude of what will face us in a soon coming time. I'm speaking not only from a prophetic understanding of prophecy, but also from the practicalities and the realities of my own life. We left Minnesota to come here to South Africa at a community where that has been established for 25 years in one of the most remote wilderness locations in North America. I'm a New Yorker by birth. I'm a city slicker. I'm an urbane man. And the Lord 25 years ago, by a word of God directed to me unmistakably when my foot came over a chain across the entrance to a bankrupt boys camp for sale, where I was taken by some believers just to the curiosity of seeing the property in a place in the country. Minnesota, where is that? I came, my foot came down on the property and the Lord said, Dominion, the name that the property now has borne for 25 years, end time teaching center, community refuge. That's all he said, but that was enough to give up a 17 room house in New Jersey, nine bedrooms and five baths and two Volvo's and a whole charismatic lifestyle to come out to that remote place and to begin without any knowledge of even what community is. And we've been there for 25 years with the exception of three years when God required the entire enterprise to be brought into death and the property abandoned and not one soul allowed to remain. And the one elder who would not take my view that God was wanting the whole thing brought into death, not because of some internal implosion of things going wrong in community. Ironically, they were beginning to go right. It didn't end because of some failure. It ended as a requirement of God to bring something into death without explanation, because if something is explained, where was the death? It's death because you don't know and yet are required, but it was so implicit and so clear to me. But one elder said, no, I don't see that. I like living in the country. In fact, he was already in my house. I had already moved and we had one last showdown. And again, I pleaded with him. God is wanting a complete abandonment of this property. 55 souls were living there. It was a 10, a flourishing community for 10 years. And he wanted everything brought into death, not only the property, but the ministry that was recognized by the federal government. My marriage was brought into death. You know, when you're a man approaching 60 and you're no longer in community, no longer in ministry, and God puts you on a sabbatical silence, I was forbidden even to speak publicly. And the Lord did not say how long this would go on, but there was a death of not being able to minister. There was a death of the abandonment of the property. There was a death of a wife, threatening divorce and suicide and children leaving and everything just coming apart without explanation. This brother refused to leave. We had one final showdown. He still refused. I said, okay, well, I'd see your baby. He came to the breakfast table the next morning before we departed. And the moment I laid eyes on him, I said, what happened to you? He was as white as a sheet. He said, well, he said, I prayed last night before I went to bed. I said, Lord, if I'm in error, you know, correct me. He's not the kind of man that he would think he could be an error because everything was according to principles. And the Lord said to him, and I remember every syllable, even with my dull capacity for memory, the Lord said to him, if you will not leave, I will kill you. There was a necessity for death saints. I'm not trying to intrigue you, give you a little anecdotal information. I'm trying to underline the enormous significance of the subject that God is wanting to bring to you in one night that required a death of a very palpable kind that in the three years in which we were in death and away from that property on the one or two occasion, I had to come back for something, especially in the winter when the roads were not plowed out and the snow was up and the doors were creaking in the wind. And there was not a soul, a voice, a laugh or a shout of a thing that had been alive to 55 people. I can't tell you how eerie that is, that I drove my car up as far as I could open the door and my dog went out of the car, took 10 steps and came back with his tail between his legs. The death was experienced. It was tasted. We had to realize and experience the death. And what did God do with me in that period of time? He sends me to a Lutheran seminary of all things, a liberal Lutheran seminary. 65% of the students were women and they were feminist witches and they were out for my blood. And every day when I went into these classes, there was such friction, such anger, such bitterness, such threats, because I did call God he, I did use the male pronoun for God. And these women called that sexist language. I can't begin to tell you, I came home where I was living battered and bloody daily from the the remarkable encounter with these, these women who were not just out to modify Christianity, but to radically transform it in a feminist way. That was part of the three years. But in the course of those seminary days, not because of any course that I took or instructor, the Lord was beginning to open a revelation of the mystery of Israel that I had never seen before. For me, Israel was a country like any other. I went there to minister to the body of Christ, but I did not know, nor did I want to consider that the nation itself has a destiny because I was so jealous for the glory of the church. I didn't want this to see that glory shared with some nation in a dubious condition, but the Lord made quite clear that the mystery of Israel is the issue of his glory. You can read that in Romans as Paul comes to the end of his brilliant statement in Romans chapters nine through 11. He concludes with a, an outburst of remarkable praise or the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God. Who's been his counselor. Where did this come from? This scheme of God, of this mystery of Israel and the church, this reciprocal relationship between two bodies that are so antithetical, so opposed by nature, Jews and Gentiles. And yet the one without the other cannot come in to the ultimate destiny of God. There's a reciprocity and one has bettered and affected the other. Salvation has even come to the one through the failure of the other. And through that salvation now, they, through whom salvation was forfeited should be moved to jealousy. It's a remarkable complex scheme. And Paul says, I would not have you to be ignorant of this mystery lest you become wise in your own conceit, that if you miss this, you miss the heart of God. You miss an understanding of what the whole spectral cosmic redemptive faith is about. And you're condemned to a kind of Christianity that is a succession of Sundays, even with charismatic improvement. You miss the whole glory of the faith, the whole heroic call of the faith, the whole significant conclusion of the age is the relationship of the church to this body. And that every meeting, every coming together is in one, if it's led by the spirit and with the seriousness that it deserves is a preparation for this conservation. Take a text like Ezekiel 37, the Valley of Dry Bones, which I just preached in Lady Smith. Get the tape. It is gorgeous. What a state and what the God that were the Lord's designed for tonight, because in that remarkable text of Israel, acknowledging we are cut off. We are without hope. We are as dry bones. Have you ever heard or known historically for that nation to make that acknowledgement? Quite the contrary. We're the kind of people that we can come out of the concentration camps with a tattooed number on our wrist. And we're saying never again, we're not saying we are without hope. Our hope is in ourselves. The whole national anthem of Israel is the hope, but it's not the hope in God. It's the hope in the state. It's the hope of human endeavor. It's the hope of human self-sufficiency, which is what we are as Jews. Can you understand that? What's at stake here is God's statement about the human condition, about the whole issue of what, of meaning of life from the nations, as it is explicated and demonstrated in allowing Israel to take a shot at it herself. Zionistically, through her own effort, through her own ability, and coming really close in the most remarkable event in modern times, in a half century, a nation establishes itself. God is there in a kind of, what's the word, providential way to protect and to give assist, but it's essentially the endeavor of men. And God is there in a kind of, what's the word, and what's the result of it? Exacerbating differences with their neighbors, cruel violence, injustice. Do you know that one of the great issues of Israel today is the justification of the use of torture? Did you ever think that there would come a time when Jews would condone the use of torture? But what are you going to do when the extremity of your own life and the necessity for survival requires you to extract information from suspected terrorists, that if you could obtain that information and save Israel from a bomb, bus bombing, or something in the streets of Jerusalem, it's saving 50, 60, 70 Jewish lives. And so if you have to use a little pressure, a little force, if you have to torture, what are you going to do? It's expedient. It's an exigency. It's not something that you can consider in a moral and ethical way because the issue of survival, but it's the issue of survival without God by men in their own merit, their own ability. You understand? God has boxed Israel into a predicament, which even Jews cannot solve. And the object of it is to show them their human inadequacy, to show them that without God, there has got to be these kinds of consequences. Only God can plant them in the land. And when we read that in the prophets, and I will return you and I will plant you and I will establish you and you will know fear no more. And there will not be terror at night. And there's no way to understand those promises as already being fulfilled because Israel is in terror. Israel is in fear. So there's a future time of another return after an expulsion through violence and judgment that God himself will affect by his own power, bringing them back from the most remote places where they will be driven or will have gone in flight. And they will know in that day that I am the Lord who has spoken and performed this. I'll tell you what, if you remain indifferent to this subject after tonight, I would not be optimistic for your corporate future. Because to remain indifferent to the issue that is being put before you tonight is to be indifferent to that which God has calculated for his own glory. Because Israel's return has nothing to do with Israel's merit or has to do with this in himself. And an opportunity to demonstrate that once and for all before the age ends with a people so patently undeserving that their return from expulsion and being settled again in the land and being planted and being blessed in a millennial blessedness is the statement of God as God who will have mercy upon whom he will have mercy. The question is, will you have it? Now, I don't know about you people of Dutch descent. What you're feeling is about Jews. First countries till now have been Anglican. New Zealand, Australia, England itself. I have suffered so patent disrespect where I spoke on Romans 11 at a fellowship in England. And the elders never concluded the meeting. They never said thank you, but no thank you. They left the room and never closed the meeting with prayer and just left us with our faces sticking up because they were so turned off on a message on the subject of Israel's restoration, which the Lord gave me to speak because it contradicts their whole view of the faith. When they speak of restoration, they're speaking about the restoration of the church in an apostolic New Testament way, the revival of the fivefold ministry, divine government, all the kinds of things in which I once used to luxuriate, but they never think of restoration in terms of a nation and being English. I don't know what that is. I think that there's a depth of anti-Semitism. That's not the blatant crude kind, but the kind that does not want to consider that God has a destiny for people that we would not have chosen. It's a stumbling stone in Zion for Gentiles, for Anglo-Saxons, and maybe German, people of German and Dutch extraction. I don't know, but search your hearts. I'll tell you this, dear saints, don't measure your love of God and the depth of your relationship with him in the euphoria of your choruses. Measure it in the cold gray dawn and the consideration of a people who by every reckoning have nothing going for them that should evoke our admiration, our respect, or our sympathy, rather our resentment or our irritation. The issue of the Jew for the church is the issue of God. It's not an issue of sentiment or of dislike. It's the issue of our union with his heart for a people whom he loves unconditionally, even in their worst condition. What is our response? That's why I say, will the true church please stand up? I don't know if I myself have that capacity. The fact that I'm a Jew by birth doesn't automatically confer a natural disposition for my own people. I've met Jewish anti-Semites who despise their own people. The love of the Jew, particularly when they shall be in their last day's extremity and the willingness to extend mercy to them at risk to yourself is the ultimate statement of one's own relationship with God. You better know it now and start searching your heart now and preparing your heart now. Now, I didn't tell you that the Lord brought us back. It proved to be three years. I came back by myself first to a lonely and deserted property. I painted the house yellow, a garish yellow, because everything was so dismal and steeped in death. It was so melancholy and pathetic. And when the Lord released me from my sabbatical silence, he said, you don't know me, but you've been praying and we believe that God wants you to speak to us a seminar on Israel and the church in the last days, that exact thing. And so I went trembling, not having spoken in 14 months. And when it was over, the pastor said, this was historic on the very first message. I know what it means to be prophetic and not be, has outlines and graphs and charts and just gush out the revelation, the things that God has been seeping in your spirit, not knowing how it's going to come out. You don't know what the next day's message is. But I began with that first message. What kind of a church is it that can move Israel to jealousy? Has it ever been demonstrated yet in the earth? We've moved them to anger, to irritation, to vexation. My mother can't even take the name of Jesus into her mouth simply. Jews will cross the street rather than have the cross of the spine of a church fall upon them as a shadow. So have they come to detest the one name alone that can save them through a church that has been brutal, has compelled their conversions. I mean, they're steeped in blood. You know, the history of Jews in Germany and locked in synagogues and set afire by the crusaders, forced conversions, mass suicide called Kiddush Hashem, sanctifying the name of God by killing your wife and your children, slitting you and you're slitting your own throat that when the pagan horde was, they found every Jew dead and that was sanctifying the name of God. That's in our history. So how are you going to move that people to jealousy? What should you perform? What kind of service? What kind of song service? What is God after? Paul doesn't give us any footnote, but yet there's an ultimate requirement made of us that if we will aspire toward it and seek the Lord for it, it will not only affect Jews, it will transform us and affect our communities and the world. Having not taken that mandate seriously has made us to come up short, not only for the Jew, but for the Greek. They serve a purpose for us that we have not recognized, but need to understand in these last days. And after our return from that three year death, you know how I left for that message to go to California. I had a suitcase in one hand and my attaché in my other hand with my papers and thoughts. And I came out of my yellow painted house and I stood by the barn. It was five or 6 p.m. And the sun was going down on this yellow house. It was the most pathetic, melancholy, heart-wrenching picture you could imagine. You didn't hear another voice. It was silent. And I just looked at that and I started to bawl. I broke and I wept. And the Lord said, they that go forth bearing precious seed weeping shall doubtless return, bringing their sheaves with them. I hope that you'll be included in those sheaves. There was a suffering and a death merely for the revelation of the mystery of Israel. What then will it cost to fulfill the mystery on the part of the church? If this is the price we have to pay for the revelation of it, and are we willing for that price? And is there a glory without a suffering? And when we came back, the Lord began to take that last word off the shelf that I didn't understand, refuge, and made it clear that we were in remote northern Minnesota, its strategic location for Jews in flight out of Canada, even from Siberia through the Bering Straits and who knows what and what peoples will pass through. And now we are linked with numbers of other communities. You've got to be a community to provide refuge. Isolated individuals, however virtuoso, cannot pull it off. It needs the corporate strength of a tested body who will not be easily offended because they've paid their own dues in their own relationships together and have graduated from being hypersensitive and easily bruised. There's a spiritual preparation as well as a physical. So I want to tell you, saints, my convictions are not only out of my understanding of scripture that is replete in Isaiah, Jeremiah, read chapters 30, 31, the time of Jacob's trouble, Ezekiel chapter 20, I will meet with you in the wilderness of the nations, Hosea chapter 2, I will plead with you in the wilderness, Amos chapter 9, I will sift you through all nations. There's a pattern. Once you get into this, you'll wonder where it was all your life. It's inescapable. But that my understanding is confirmed by the realities of our life. 25 years in northern Minnesota in the coldest spot in the North American continent, colder, our temperatures are colder than Alaska traditionally. It's not a place a man would elect to go. But why there? Because it's out of the way. Because it's away from urban centers where any Jew will be instantly identified and will be his death. God is going to take these Steven Spielbergs and Jerry Levin, the head of Time Warner Corporation and all the big shots and they're going to find themselves stripped and out in places of desolation that they would never have chosen and all of the amenities of life removed where you're compelled to face the ultimate issues of human existence itself. That's how I got saved. 35 years ago, I was brought up and out from my whole context, California teaching profession and thrust out into the nations with only what I could carry on my back, living off the side of the road as a hitchhiker, being picked up off the side of the road by believers, being taken in, being comforted, being spoken to, being addressed, being turned to the painting at Colmar, France, being given a revelation in the first reading of a New Testament that I got from a fellow passenger, being spoken to by God in Jerusalem and being called by name. My own testimony of being sifted through the nations to come to an ultimate salvation in Jerusalem itself is a paradigm and a picture of what I think is in store for my people in a larger way. Am I going to pick them up off the side of the road? Have you got a place to hide them? When we came back and my wife said, she'll never come back to that property again. Finally, she came back and she'll never live in that house again, but she'll live in it if I'd extend the living room. So I extended the living room and therefore I have for the first time in 25 years, a study of my own. I don't have to do my ponderous writing on my lap. And the young man who did the work, a young Christian carpenter, that was his first business for his new business. He left a gaping hole in the wall going under the attic. And I said, aren't you going to close that up? He said, no. And he said, it's your Corrie ten Boom hole. And when he said that, the Holy Ghost came down over me as it's doing right now. And that hole remains to this day. There's a desk right up against it. Unless you knew it, you wouldn't know that that desk can just be moved away and six, seven, eight or more adults can go right under the, the roof line and be hidden. Dear Saints, believe me, I despise sensationalism. I can't, God has had to rub my face in the grit of this, but I would be doing you disservice if I gave you a nice sermon tonight and don't think I'm not capable to bless you out of your socks with such brilliant biblical exposition, but not when I have one occasion only to send a word into your midst of the things that shall shortly come to pass, for which you need the most profound preparation, both spiritually and physically and practically, because you are out of the way, because you are not in a great urban center, because you are off to the side and somewhere the 80,000 Jews in South Africa are going to have to routes of flight and escape and safety. This is not a message tonight. This is nuts and bolts alert of the future. And where do you think we're going from here? Zimbabwe and Zambia, which I think will be the continuing flight out for the surviving remnant. We'll find out when we get there. But you know what I know by now? Every place that I am is a place intended by God for refuge and flight. Why not be there? So I commend this book to you. I thought even to read a portion and the scriptures that I've cited, the Lord will give you others. And I want to pray for the body of Christ at this locality, for their preparation, for their understanding that tonight was a life and death situation. That's why I was in that strange mood. It was not my antibiotics crunched. I don't know what I was groaning through something because something had to come forth tonight. That's not a message. And I looked at the scriptures, they're overwhelming, but where do you begin? It's not the occasion to give a dissertation and a list of scriptures. Somehow the urgency and the burden needed to come forth through a groaning because life and death is at stake. And not only the issue of Jewish survival, but the issue of Jewish restoration is the issue of the Lord's coming. How do you see that, Art? Because Acts 3.21 says that the Lord is contained in the heavens under self-imposed confinement, waiting for the restoration, the fulfillment of the restoration spoken by the prophets since the world began. And that's not of the church, that's of Israel. He comes when they shall say, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, when they shall say it. He comes when they shall be redeemed and returned that he might be the greater David who rules over them forever, according to Ezekiel 37, 2 Chronicles 7 and many other places. The Lord's coming is the issue of Israel's restoration. And the issue of the Lord's coming is the issue of his kingdom. You do believe that? You do believe the kingdom? Or are you content with human government? Black or white? Corrupt? It must by necessity be. Come Lord Jesus is a cry for righteousness and justice and equity in the earth when the law shall go forth out of Zion and the word of the Lord out to all nations, out of that pivotal nation, which God has elected as central to all nations, not because they're mighty, but because they're weak, not because they're great, but because they're few, not because they're impressive, but because they stink. Their track record stinks. They have blasphemed his name in every nation, but I will have mercy upon him. I'll have mercy and I will bless him. I will bless for I am that I am and my, and the issue of Israel will demonstrate it forever to every nation. Got the picture? Lord, my God, if your spirit Lord is not with this speaking, I don't know what to say. What should I say? Lord, if this is your heart tonight in one night to stun Pierce into a Christian community, and I'm looking at quality saints here, Lord, I know that this is an appointment, a one night appointment coming at distance because they are on a route of flight and safety and refuge because they have a mandate and a call because they need to be alerted to it because they need to consider themselves privileged in it. And even if it should cost them something of sacrifice or suffering, or even the loss of life, they will not complain, but count themselves privileged because when you finally brought that seventh message in Sacramento, California, what kind of a church is it that will move Jews to jealousy? Your answer was a modern church. And a modern church is definitive church in every generation. And especially the last, it's not a grim thing from which we should shrink. How come us as a privileged call, whether it is required or not, we should live as if modern is alcohol. It's another mode of being, not just of dying. Lord, I bless this people, bless this people, what I pray and open their understanding. And if there's something in their Dutch hearts of the kind that I have seen in Anglican hearts, that they need to consider that this stumbling stone of Zion is designed and calculated a flush out that Aryan racial, ethnic, national sense of superiority and pride as nothing else will let them face it. And if they have resisted your servant tonight and have looked cynically and who's this guy and who's he to say, and they sense an irritation, let them recognize what the root of that irritation is. It's not this guy. And let them face it. We need community in truth and the grace of it and the sanctifying, redemptive work of it in order to prepare, to be prepared, to be a people of the last days for such task as this. It's not an option. Sunday services will never do it. We need the intensity of the sanctifying work of God that only comes in the frequency of people who are together. So my God, may you demolish religious categories that have to do with safety, respectability, politeness, comfort, and show us what alcohol was from our salvation. Ever. We're a chosen people for the last days and what has comforting convenience to do with it? Come my God and shake us and remove those religious notions that the world loves because it saves the world from the kind of challenge that a radical apostolic church is designed to be. They love it if we will be satisfied with Sunday services, only the midweek Bible study. But when they see a people earnest, taking the mandate of God seriously, the powers of darkness that have prevailed uncontested over every locality will be threatened for the first time. Jesus they knew and Paul they knew, but who knew? Until they see an earnestness and a seriousness to do your will. So Lord, I bless this people. Help them as they search out the scriptures, as they look into the prophets, as they look into the Psalms. Let them understand what it means to pray for the peace of Jerusalem is more than just a little unctuous quip at the end of a prayer time. To pray for the peace of Jerusalem is to say whatever it takes in me for that peace and for Israel to pass through judgment before peace, I'm willing. So we bless them Lord. Bless them and let them take this fragmentary and convoluted speaking and sort it out and sift it out and discuss it among themselves and get your heart. I bless them Lord with this word. Let not a syllable of it return through void. Thank you for historic occasion, an appointed night that you have given so much is at stake. May we rejoice in the privilege of it, the high calling of God in Christ Jesus and the precious grace of God sufficient for that call that you might be glorified for as Paul said, for of him and through him and to him are all things to whom be glory forever. If this is of you Lord, it has got to be through you. We can't do it religiously. We can't do it professionally. Our distinguished human abilities will not do it. It's got to be through you and the resurrection power of God by those who live and move and have their being in it that you might be glorified forever. Bless this people and let them rise my God to that call and to that reality is my prayer in Jesus name and God's people said amen.